Saturday, November 26, 2011

The New (to me) Accord

After the 1999 Accord was deemed a total loss, I ran through about a dozen different cars that I thought I wanted. I looked at everything from Subaru's to Mercedes Benz to BMW. I thought for a bit that a Subaru Outback would be the best car because it is a great combination of all-weather go-anywhere traction and incredible reliability and longevity. While I was selling Subaru's I routinely saw them traded in with well in excess of 200,000 and one in particular with over 350,000 miles. I went to look at the Subaru I thought was the perfect car. It had great miles, was the right body style, and transmission. However, when I got to the dealership to look at it it was suddenly $1000 more than what I had agreed to on the phone with the dealer, so that one was crossed off the list.

After that setback, I realized that there weren't really any cars out there in the Subaru line with the miles I was looking for in the price range I wanted, so I started re-thinking what I was looking for, and ended up right back where I was before...looking at Honda Accords.

My 2001 Accord at Afton Mountain Vineyards

After a few days of searching, I actually ended up finding a 2001 Accord EX Coupe within my price range with the miles I was looking for, in the right color, with the features I wanted. All in all it took 23 days to go from being in the accident to finally owning my replacement car.

Since I purchased the car I've driven approximately 670 miles, and can say this: the car is wonderful. There are small things I miss from the previous one, but overall the decision to take this car over the others out there was good. One thing that surprised me is I really did not sacrifice any utility in going for the Accord Coupe over the Accord Sedan. The coupe looks better, but other than that everything from the Sedan carried over, including the trunk space, which I feel is actually more usable in the coupe than the Sedan because of how the opening is cut.

The first 670 miles actually included the car's first road trip with me. I'm working on planning a few more for this summer and for my winter break from school which is coming up. I won't write much on the first road trip as I wrote about everywhere I went back when I had the Volvo. You can read the post here. I will, however, have a more complete updated review on Afton Mountain Vineyards posted in these pages shortly. As it is in final review and drafting it won't be released until next week sometime.